InvGate Blog

The change advisory board (CAB) can be one of the most important and useful meetings a service-oriented IT organization holds. It sets out a view of what’s happening to key services over the next week (or longer depending on its frequency and timeframe), confirms the impact to the business, reviews previous change activity, and looks at continual service improvement (CSI).

Topics: ITIL, ITSM, change management, IT Service Desk, CAB

Let’s assume that you’ve just taken your ITIL Foundation Certification exam. Or, even better, you’ve still to take it and are currently pondering how best to take what you’ll learn in your studies and to apply it in the workplace. Importantly, not just in the work that you personally undertake, but also in improving the wider IT service delivery and support capabilities of your IT department.

Topics: ITIL

With the creation of IT service management (ITSM) capabilities, you’ll find that role types are an important aspect to include; because, after all, you can’t get anything done without the right people (and with those right people knowing exactly what they should and shouldn’t be doing). To help, ITIL offers up a number of generic role types that are then applicable across its various ITSM processes (or capabilities) – where these are then specific, rather than generic, roles, i.e. the generic roles become specific when attached to a certain ITIL process such as incident management.

Topics: ITIL, ITSM, enterprise service management

So, you’re about to take your ITIL Foundation Certification exam and can’t wait to get the new qualification. However, if you’re like us, it might have been quite a while since you last took an exam, and you now feel a little apprehensive about proving that you know your stuff. Plus, even if this isn’t the case, you still might be thinking: How can I increase the probability that I’ll pass the exam? Perhaps even with flying colors.

Topics: ITIL, Help Desk, ITSM

You’ve probably already heard of COBIT – it has been around for a while. If you have, then you might remember COBIT from its days of being an approach that was applicable to those with, shall we say, audit requirements. You might also remember COBIT’s longer name (as was) – “Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies” – which reinforced its audit-based roots. But it’s just plain-old COBIT now. Like ITIL, and the IT Infrastructure Library nomenclature, the acronym has superseded the longer-form name to reflect the evolved focus and scope of coverage. And if COBIT is potentially of interest to you, especially with the new COBIT 2019 recently replacing 2012’s COBIT 5, please read on for 10 tips on how best to start your COBIT journey.

Topics: ITIL, ITSM, COBIT

Continual service improvement (CSI) has unfortunately been a long-neglected area in IT service management (ITSM), sometimes viewed as the ultimate post-success undertaking (“We’ll get to that once all of the planned work has been completed” – which is shorthand for “never”). With the publication of ITIL Practitioner, CSI as crucial capability has become significantly more prominent, but the results could often be better. This blog explains why and what to do about it.

Topics: ITIL, ITSM, CSI, Continual service improvement

In my last ITSM 101 blog, I wrote about five ways people commonly misunderstand and misuse ITIL. From overly focusing on the processes, through expecting a new IT service management (ITSM) tool to fix everything, to running large projects (or programs) that take too long to start to deliver value. In this blog, I offer up five more common ITIL mistakes and what you can do to avoid them.

Topics: ITIL, Service Desk, ITSM

If you follow Twitter and read blogs about IT service management (ITSM), as I do, you will probably have read lots of complaints about ITIL. And yet most of the IT organizations that I work with use it as the basis for how they run IT, and it seems to work very well for them. So why are there so many complaints? Well, when I read the complaints, they almost always seem to be based on a distorted view of what ITIL is, or what it says you should do. So, before you complain too, think about my first five examples of ways that people misuse or misconstrue ITIL.

Topics: ITIL, Service Desk, ITSM, enterprise service management, Request Management

The major incident management process can be one of the most important IT service management (ITSM) processes for an organization. A major incident can hurt business operations (and thus revenues). And when a major incident is handled badly it reflects negatively on your organization and will likely increase customer inquiries and complaints. In addition, it can cause issues for your frontline staff because, at best, they face an increased workload and at worst, team morale is damaged. This blog offers 5 ways in which to improve major incident communications and thus minimize the impact major incidents have on all affected.

Topics: ITIL, Incident Management, Major Incidents